MeatRetreat and Distro Selection

Just spent the past four days with my buddies out in West Virginia. We all met at a cabin and essentially disconnected from cell service and the Internet in order to play video games and board games! The cabin was amazing and the event was awesome. 

What started out as a joke in our Discord server soon became reality. Because of the pandemic my friends and I found ourselves expanding our network of friends using Discord. Because of this I thought it would be fun to suggest maybe a retreat of some sort. This ended in laughs and fun ribbing but in the end it proved to be an awesome idea.

We played games like Dice Throne, Captain Sonar, Villagers, Magic the Gathering, Chess, Texas Hold'm. Everyone brought what they wanted to play and we gave tons of games a shot. 

However, that gave me little time for doing more research on distro selection. I did give it some thought on the way home and my course of action is going to be this:

My main PC will be Pop!_OS and my laptop that I hack around on (where this post is coming from) will be Arch Linux. I really feel that Arch is a good intermediary step to better understand the nuances with the linux environment. If the Steam Deck is really going to be all that it is sounding like it is, knowing the Arch structure and ecosystem will be important to taking full advantage of the hardware to do more than just playing Steam games!

Steam Deck

One of the intriguing thoughts about using Arch Linux as my primary distro is that it would prepare me for my Steam Deck when its released. This device is going to be more than just a way to play Steam games. I believe Valve is really stepping up to make a major evolution in the gaming industry and open up a new market for developers. 

Since the Steam Deck uses Arch Linux as its underlying system, knowing the inner workings of the setup can potentially unlock more advanced features or use cases for the console.

Application Considerations

I was notified by Google today on my Windows machine about an update to Google Drive and how they are changing over to a new version. This got me thinking about all the secondary applications I use that I didn't think about. So I've compiled a non-complete list below:

• Google Drive

• Dropbox

• 7zip

• Discord

• Zoom

Hmm, now that I look at the list, its a lot smaller than I thought. I have purposefully not added applications that I know will be available such as Visual Studio Code, various programming language SDKs such as Python, Rust, Java. Video editing and image editing are native to Linux.

Office applications are through Google. I left the Microsoft office product eco system years ago when I was no longer a student and then had to pay the fees to write word documents.

Pop!_OS and NVidia

It should be noted that Pop!_OS offers 2 downloads, one standard and one with NVidia drivers packaged. Windows users may not care much of this but this is significant. One of the largest frustrations with transitioning to Linux or even operating Linux is a graphics driver failure. For those not accustomed to the command line, doing a driver upgrade/installation and having it go wrong could end a user up in the console with no immediate recourse for a fix.

Ubuntu does provide NVidia drivers, however they need to be enabled in the settings as a 3rd party driver.

It's still a three way mental gymnastics between Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, and Arch Linux. Right now Pop!_OS and Arch are the front runners with a heavy lean towards Pop!_OS. The ease of access to software, drivers, and enabling games from Windows makes Pop!_OS more intriguing. However the sheer snappiness and responsiveness in Arch Linux still makes it very appealing. Sometimes its also good to just know that there isn't a whole bunch of crap installed along with your operating system. Arch gives you this very minimalist setup that helps reduce software bloat.

Linux Versions

In Criteria, below, I alluded to determining whether Ubuntu or Arch would be the ideal distribution  of Linux to use. In the fast few days, as I dig further into the benefits of both, I've come to realize, there is a third distro I should consider. Pop_OS is a version of Debian maintained and curated by System76. I've used this distro in the past with some work laptops and enjoyed it, however because they were work laptops, I really could not take full advantage of the OS and its market space.

Of all the distros I am most familiar with, Ubuntu is the most. I've used this distro since before release 10 and have seen it grow and mature. The primary focus of this effort for me is to be able to continue my gaming on my PC though, and the more I read, the more Pop_OS sounds positioned to support it the most "out of the box."

Some of the games I'll be evaluating in this experiment will be No Man's Sky, Magic the Gathering: Arena, and Battletech. Two of the three are available directly through Steam so we will see how they are handled with Steam's Proton overlay. Magic the Gathering: Arena or MTG Arena will be a bit more of a challenge. MTG Arena is distributed directly and will require some sort of secondary support like Wine and/or Lutris.

Criteria

My majority personal use of Microsoft Windows is for gaming. Through the years the gaming services have become advanced, consider Steam for example. They've developed consoles leveraging Linux and tools like Wine. This leads me to believe that, if anything, I can get the core games that I enjoy working within a Linux environment, hopefully with minimal effort.

The graphics card in my computer is an NVidia card (but who's isn't amirite?) so managing the graphics card also needs to be easy. I can't have the GUI I chose suddenly bonk out on me cause of a driver update.

Finally there needs to be easy access to install software, whether from a market place or directly from a vendor. Essentially this limits me to Debian or Redhat package manager (RPM) distributions. I lean more towards Debian as its the OS I know better, the question is do I go with raw Debian or Ubuntu? Ubuntu has to be, by far, the most supported and well rounded distro I can think of. If I were to suggest to someone to try Linux, I would suggest Ubuntu. I work with Redhat at work and I've tried Arch Linux (which impressed me with its sheer speed and responsiveness on my older systems.) 

Redhat is not an option for home though considering there's a fee for service with the solution. Arch Linux is a strong possibility but there's much to take into account if I'm going to use this as my distribution. There is more work in Arch to get things up and running compared to a Debian distro, but I am going to ponder it over the next couple of days. As I said before, I was very impressed by the speed and responsiveness of Arch Linux.

An Acceptable Challenge

 
I've thrown the gauntlet down, more so to myself than at others. After administering and using Microsoft operating systems for many years, I've never truly cut myself away from the operating system. See there's a very strong hold on Microsoft's ability to provide a gaming platform, AKA Windows. Steam has recently changed this playing field as well as the explosion of indie developers that do not want be held to AAA game engine standards and publisher requirements.
Windows 11 is released Oct 5, 2021. At that time I will wipe my hard drive and install Linux. I'll cut myself from Microsoft completely and see how it goes, documenting it all here.
I will provide information about potential distros and build details as I start to figure them out.
The purpose of this effort is not to malign Microsoft or Windows. The recent discussions about Windows 11 though have made this effort all the more viable as I look to leave that ecosystem to something more freeing.